Monday, December 31, 2012

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

The discussion of the self-made man in
this series has been dominated by political figures. In large measure, that’s
because I see the predominant vision of the self-made man in this era of U.S.
history as a decisively civic one, and politicians are typically in the
business of making, and acting upon, public-sector arguments. But other
versions of the self-made man were thriving, much in the way that there were
alternatives to the largely religious vision of the seventeenth century, or the
agrarian ones of the eighteenth. (Remember that Benjamin Franklin played the
role of a politician – among many others – over the course of his eighteenth
century life.) But one of the truly striking aspects of the self-made man in
the early nineteenth century was the way it led people working in arenas that
were not necessarily in the public sector to cast their work in such terms.

Take artists and intellectuals. In an
important sense, self-making is a credential for such people: whatever their
backgrounds, they don’t gain recognition unless they can somehow carve out a
space (aesthetic, ideological, or otherwise) they can call their own. Until the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, they operated in the shadow of
British and European models. After that, though, they became American. Which, to a great extent,
involved the paradoxical assertion of individualism – a term coined by
Frenchman Alexis de Tocquville after a visit to the United States in 1831-32 –
as a national trait.

There’s no better illustration of this
cultural development than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was the to nineteenth
century was Bob Dylan was to the twentieth: a celebrity rock star whose
elliptical words were dissected with passionate enthusiasm by generations of
devotees. Today Emerson is remembered principally as an essayist, but in his
own day he was celebrated as a poet, and his periodic tours packed houses and
allowed him to make a living on the basis of his writings.

Which is not to say he ever saw himself
as a man who earned a paycheck. Born in 1803 as the descendant of generations
of Puritan ministers (his grandfather was a chaplain for the rebels during the
American Revolution), Emerson was educated at the elite Boston Latin School and
Harvard and ordained as a Unitarian minister. He took over the pulpit of the
Second Church of Boston, which dated back to the early seventeenth century, and
commanded a princely salary. But following the death of his first wife in 1831,
he grew increasingly disaffected with his church, and with organized religion
generally. His first major essay, “Nature” (1836), published anonymously,
became the manifesto of the Transcendentalist movement in the United States,
part of a broader cultural movement (including the painters of the Hudson River
School, for example), placing primacy on the natural world as a source of inspiration.
Emerson’s declaration of independence is widely considered his Harvard
commencement address of 1837, “The American Scholar,” in which he exhorted his
audience to forge an original relationship to the world. “Books are fine for a
scholar’s idle times,” he asserted. “When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” (Bold
as this was, it carried with it echoes of the Puritans, who revered the Bible
but nevertheless placed primacy on the individual conscience.)

Emerson’s signature statement on the
importance of the self-made man in its broadest formulations was
“Self-Reliance,” a text he delivered in lectures before its first publication
in 1841. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” he
exhorted. Other lines resound through history like song lyrics: “Whoso would be
a man, must be a non-comformist”: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds”; “Your goodness must have some edge to it.” Insofar as self-making
is an act of discipline, Emerson asserts, it’s less one of preparation or
diligence than a sheer force of will to cut through the Gordian knot of
tradition and duty. There’s something thrilling about this, but something
mystifying, too: how does one will oneself to will? Emerson’s critics at the
time and ever since have wondered whether there was less to his pronouncements
than met his (transcendental) eyeball.

Such suspicions were reinforced by
Emerson’s tendency to sidestep the raging political disputes of the time. “If
an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with
the latest news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy
infant; love thy woodchopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for
black folk a thousand miles off,” he asks in “Self-Reliance.” Over a century
and a half later, we recognize the type Emerson criticizes – crusaders for
social justice who have a curious blindspot for the quotidian realities of
their lives and ours. But it requires a real squint to see abolitionists as
bigots, particularly since many of the outrages of Emerson’s time were a good
deal closer than a thousand miles away. He would eventually come around the
cause, but a strong vein of what seems like caution seemed to mark his
politics.

Some of his acolytes were less cautious.
His cranky young friend Henry David Thoreau rented land from Emerson, putting
up the small cheap cabin that allowed him to write Walden (1854). Like Emerson, there was a curiously insistent public
thrust to Thoreau’s private life, typified by his more militant variety of
antislavery as expressed in the famous essay (now known as “Civil
Disobedience”) that landed him in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest
over the Mexican War, as well as his 1854 essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in
which he excoriated the complacency of his fellow New Englanders on the issue.
Thoreau’s insistence on living a simple life had an important component of
self-made ideology embedded in it; he regarded relying on others as a
compromise of an essential American freedom (even if he relied on his mother
and sister to do his laundry for him).

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Jim is taking some holiday vacation time. His recent reading includes David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a book he's been meaning to take on for some time. The release of the recent movie starring Tom Hanks, among others, came and went, but release of the movie tie-in edition prompted a delayed departure into Mitchell's fictional universe. The novel is simply dazzling, a tour de force by a writer who effortlessly tells a series of interlocking stories that stretch from the 19th century far into an indeterminate future. Those stories include mystery, gothic and science-fiction, all of which comprise a profound meditation on the nature of history. Mitchell is positively Joycean in his literary ventriloquism; Mevillean in his capacity to grapple with ontological issues and Grishamesque in his ability to create and sustain suspense in the individual tales. (Plus he has a sense of humor, which emerges most vividly when the characters of succeeding stories comment/reveal what's really going on in preceding ones.) Clocking in at over 500 pages, it's a big book, but a deeply satisfying one. The tie-in edition features a new afterword by the author. My guess is that the film will eventually become a cult classic as novel and film synergetically feed each other.

May you all find satisfaction in a good book this holiday season, among other kinds.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

This is an archive edition of AHN that first appeared in 2010. Best wishes to all for a happily restful holiday week.

Jim is observing Christmas. Not "the holidays," not "the season," but Christmas. On balance, the United States is probably still statistically a Christian nation, but its elite is largely secular, and that which isn't is religiously diverse.

Insofar as Christmas really is a minority observance among the people whose eyes may cross this blog, I don't regard that as a problem. Notwithstanding complaints on the part of some, there is no "war" on Christmas. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, if not hostile, to Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism (which I practice) in particular. But I don't think you have to be religious or Christian to find hope and cheer in a scenario of a poor child in a remote place coming into the world and transforming it by the power of word and example. And that a few wise men would sense something afoot and seek out the child (as well as a powerful satrap who would be thwarted in the attempt to find and kill a future rival). As would become clear over time, that child was never meant to be a secular king. His work, and his legacy, would prove more durable.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

In more ways than one, Lincoln was the
heir of Henry Clay, whom he idolized as “my beau ideal of a statesman.”
Literally and figuratively, he hailed from Clay’s neck of the woods – Hardin
County, Kentucky, still very much the frontier when Lincoln was born in 1809.
So was southwest Indiana, which he later described as “a wild region, with many
bears and other wild animals in the woods” at the time his family relocated
there when he was a child. The Lincolns eventually settled in Illinois, largely
because real estate titles were less confused, thanks to Jefferson’s Northwest
Ordinances, which laid down a grid for orderly settlement of the region known
as the Old Northwest.

In a brief autobiographical statement he
wrote at the time he was first running for president, Lincoln described his
childhood unsentimentally: “A[braham] though very young was large of age and had
an axe put into his hands at once, and from that within his twentythird year,
he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument – less, of
course, plowing and harvesting seasons.” He had little in the way of formal
schooling, which all told added up to about a year; “there was absolutely
nothing to excite ambition for education,” he said of his youth. That he
learned to read at all, much less become one of the greatest masters of the
English language, is nothing short of miraculous.

Because I have already written about
Lincoln as the apotheosis of the self-made man in American history, and because
the outlines of his life are familiar to many people who otherwise know little
about American history, I will not trace his biography in any detail here.
There are, however, two points worth emphasizing. The first is that almost
uniquely among the political figures that invoked the myth of the self-made
man, Lincoln’s background was authentically modest. In contrast to
contemporaries like William Henry Harrison (who won the presidency in 1840 by
championing his lowly origins), Lincoln really was born in a log cabin. Besides rural poverty, his childhood
adversity included the death of his mother when he was nine years old, chilly
relations with a remote father, and chronic depression that dogged him well
into adulthood. He had a difficult marriage, endured the death of two sons, and
experienced multiple political defeats, most painfully in his U.S. Senate race
of 1858, which he began as an underdog and came far closer to winning than
anybody had a right to expect.

To be sure, Lincoln had valuable
resources, too; his stepmother proved to be understanding and supportive, and
his wife was also supportive and politically shrewd (Clay had been a frequent
guest in her home in her youth). And there’s simply no other way to understand
the confluence of events leading up to Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency
in 1860 – a fractured Republican field, a convention in his hometown, and the
likelihood in a badly divided electorate that any nominee from his party would
go on to win the election – as anything other than astounding good luck. But
the sheer unlikelihood of Lincoln’s rise made his vertiginous rise all the more
thrilling – and all the more intriguing. Future president Woodrow Wilson
evocatively captured what made Lincoln so special, not simply in terms of the
man himself but also in terms of what he seemed to represent. “This is the
mystery of democracy,” he said in a centennial speech he delivered at Lincoln’s
(reputed) birthplace, “that its richest fruits spring up from soils which no
man has prepared and in circumstances where they are least expected.”

The other, more important point I’d like
to make is that Lincoln didn’t just live the dream. He thought long and hard
about it, and discussed it with a passionate clarity that was always more than
a mere political talking point. Lincoln’s understanding of the reality of
upward mobility helps explain his hatred of slavery. Though always insisted
that it was a moral issue – “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing his wrong” –
he made the political case against it on the basis of the way it impeded upward
mobility, because slave owners privileged (human) property over opportunity.

A speech Lincoln gave in Cincinnati in
1859 is notable in this regard. He began by noting that critics of the emerging
capitalist order claimed that all labor must be compelled by either wages or
slavery, and that the latter was preferable not only to the master, but also to
the slave, who had more personal security than the casual laborer vulnerable to
the vicissitudes of the free labor market. His reply:

There is no such thing as a man who is a
hired laborer, of a necessity, always remaining in his early condition. The
general rule is otherwise. I know it is so; and I will tell you why. When at an
early age, I was myself a hired laborer, at twelve dollars per month; and
therefore I do know that there is not always the necessity for actual labor
because once there was propriety in being so. My understanding of the hired
laborer is this: A young man finds himself of an age to be dismissed from
parental control; he has for his capital nothing, save two strong hands that
God has given him, a heart willing to labor, and a freedom to choose the mode
of his work and the manner of his employer; he has got no soil nor shop, and he
avails himself of the opportunity of hiring himself to some man who has capital
to pay him a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. He is benefited by
availing himself of that privilege. He works industriously, he behaves soberly,
and the result of a year or two’s labor is a surplus of capital. Now he buys
land on his own hook; he settles, marries, begets sons and daughters, and in
course of time he too has enough capital to hire some new beginner.

Significantly, Lincoln saw the benefits
of such a system in social terms. “This
is essentially a People’s contest,” he told Congress as the Civil War was
breaking out in 1861. “On the one side of the Union, is a struggle for
maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading
object is, to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from
all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all,
an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Three years later, Lincoln made the
point a different way to a group of Ohio soldiers: “I happen temporarily to
occupy this big White House,” he told them. “I am living witness than any of
your children may look to come hear as my father’s child has. It is in order
that each of you may have through this free government which have enjoyed, an
open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence;
that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its
desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained,
that we may not lose our birthright – not only for one, but for two or three
years. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”
Slavery threatened this jewel. And when that threat became mortal, Lincoln
acted to destroy slavery in order to save it. He lived by that credo, and died
so that it may live – for all
Americans.

Monday, December 17, 2012

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

Though
he was older than most of his revolutionary contemporaries, Benjaming Franklin was hardly the only man for whom the American
Revolution functioned as a gigantic career opportunity. We’ve already
seen the way in which it transformed the lives of relatively modest provincials
like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for whom the it provided the means
to embody and/or promote a whole new vision of self-sufficiency that seemed
impossible while living in the long shadow of imperial Britain.

A good illustration is furnished by the
career of John Adams. The fiercely ambitious Adams had already gone a good deal
farther than his shoemaker father in making his way in the world by 1776. But
he could never have amounted to much more than a resentful provincial without a
war of independence, which led to a political career, culminating in the
presidency, that he could have scarcely imagined as a boy in Boston. In some
ways Adams remained a resentful provincial to the end of his days, anxious that
other leading lights got more attention than he did. “The
history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other,”
he famously told his friend – seemingly everybody’s friend – Benjamin Rush in
1790. “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod
smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified
him with his rod and thenceforth these two conducted all the policy,
negotiations, legislatures, and war.” Though
he was vain and puritanical, Adam’s humor, self-insight, and capacity to reflect
more generously on his peers in old age redeems him.

Perhaps no Founder Father traveled
farther, literally or figuratively, than Alexander Hamilton. Given his white
racial identity in the racially stratified Caribbean, it can’t really be said
that Hamilton was a child of poverty when he was born, circa 1755, on or near
the island of Nevis (some uncertainties surround this). But his background was
hardly auspicious. “My birth is the subject of the most humiliating criticism,”
he wrote at the end of his life [930]; contemporaries like Adams described him
as “the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar.” Hamilton was (apparently) the second illegitimate child born to
Rachel Faucett Lavien, a woman of French Huguenot and other descent, who had
left her husband for Scotsman James Hamilton.The couple relocated to the Danish island of St. Croix in
1765.It was around this time,
however, that Hamilton abandoned Lavien, whose husband obtained a divorce
settlement that made it impossible for her to remarry. She opened a store
selling provisions and plantation supplies that her sons helped her run. When
she died in 1768, they were virtual orphans. The younger Hamilton went to work
for a local merchant. Biographer Ron Chernow fills in some of the details – and
clarifies just what a surprising figure Hamilton was in light of them:

Let
us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these
two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had
died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and
their aunt, uncle and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen and Alexander,
fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step
in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed,
broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying
sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals and
disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of
any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he
could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced
such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being – that this fatherless
adolescent could have ended up the founding father of a country he had not even
seen – seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence
about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it
was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of
his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned
almost entirely in the last century. [Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 26-27]

There were two key factors in Hamilton’s
triumph over adversity. The first were his evident intellectual gifts, which he
developed over the course of his life without the advantages enjoyed peers like
Jefferson. From an early age Hamilton expressed his desire to make a mark on
the world. “My ambition is prevalent, that I contemn the grov’ling and
condition of a Clerk, to which my Fortune &c. contemns me and would willing
risk my life tho’ not my character to exalt my station,” he wrote a friend in
1769, when he was barely in adolescence. “My Youth excludes me from an hopes of
immediate Preferment nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for
futurity.” He ends the letter by saying “I wish there was a war.”[AH3] Before
long he would get the preferment and the war.

Which brings us to the other notable
feature of Hamilton’s youth: his talent for attracting powerful mentors. This
began with the Presbyterian minister who raised funds to send him to the
mainland for an education (he attended King’s College, now Columbia). He
quickly became involved in revolutionary politics, joining a New York militia
and receiving the rank of captain. Parlaying connections with influential New
Yorkers like John Jay, Hamilton joined the war effort and was part of the New
York campaign of 1776 and the Battle of Trenton at the end of that year.
Invited to join the staffs of generals Henry Knox and Nathaniel Greene,
Hamilton declined because he wanted to be part of the fighting. But when
Continental Army commander George Washington asked him to serve as his aide
with a rank of lieutenant colonel, it was an offer Hamilton could not refuse.
He served at Washington’s side for four years before returning to combat and
serving with bravery at the (climatic) Battle of Yorktown.

Following his military service, Hamilton
served a stint in Congress before returning to New York to practice law. He participated
in the planning and debate for a new U.S. Constitution in 1787, and teamed up
with James Madison of Virginia and fellow New Yorker John Jay to produce The Federalist Papers, a collection of
articles advocating adoption of the Constitution published in 1787-88.Once it was ratified, Hamilton reunited
with Washington to serve as Secretary of the Treasury in the first presidential
administration, a job that allowed him – amid many objections – to lay the
foundations of a modern American economy.

Hamilton’s place as a quintessential
embodiment of the American Dream of upward mobility is somewhat obscured in the
American collective imagination. In large measure, this is because his
personality was not nearly as appealing as Franklin’s, as cagey as Jefferson’s,
or as judicious as Washington’s. Hamilton was brilliant, knew it, and did not
suffer fools gladly. (He got impatient serving in the army under Washington,
who, recognizing that Hamilton had talents, particularly in the area of
finance, that he did not, was secure enough to overlook his arrogance.)

Hamilton was also an avowed elitist.
“The voice of the people is has been said to be the voice of God; and however
much this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact,” he
reputedly said during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. “The people are
turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.” [164] Hamilton
was more diplomatic in The Federalist.
“Mechanics and manufacturers will always be inclined with few exceptions to
give their votes to merchants in preference to persons of their own professions
or trades,” he said, with substantial accuracy, in the 35th essay in
the series. He was perhaps less accurate when he went on to assert that such
workers “know that the merchant is their natural patron and friend; and they
are aware that however great the confidence they may justly feel in their own
good sense, their interests can be more effectively promoted by the merchant
than by themselves.” Hamilton was impatient with democratic pieties uttered by
ideological opponents whom he believed pandered to voters. According to one
later memoir, he reacted to a guest at a dinner party who described himself as
a “friend of the people” by asserting, “your people, sir – your people is a
great beast!” [T Parsons 109-110]

There are a number of ironies in this.
As we’ve already seen, Thomas Jefferson was a tireless adversary for the yeoman
farmer, notwithstanding his relatively highborn origins and aristocratic
tastes. Hamilton, by contrast, was the first great immigrant success story in
American history, and as such might plausibly have been expected to champion of
the little man. That said, there were also ironies within Hamilton’s snobbery.
Though he rubbed shoulders with the wealthiest of Americans, and married into
money (his father-in-law was yet another mentor), Hamilton worked ferociously
hard, showed little interest in money for its own sake, and regarded plantation
grandees as parasites. He was a lifelong opponent of slavery, and demonstrated
a scrupulousness about his professional conduct in stark contrast to his
private affairs, which were not marked by the same degree of probity (after
paying blackmail to avoid having an extramarital affair exposed, he confessed
his infidelity rather than allow his blackmailer to exploit Hamilton’s
professional connections for personal gain). Hamilton could plausibly be seen
as an eighteenth century meritocrat, a man who believed that talent could rise
in the United States, notwithstanding its idiocies, because it represented the
first best hope as a where men like him could attain eminence.

Such unsentimental clarity extended to
his view of economics. Hamilton had seen first-hand how the parochialism of
individual states had hobbled a national war effort. He also saw how Great
Britain’s banking system allowed it to finance a global empire, and how its
incipient industrialism girded an economy that remained a model for the United
States, recent political differences notwithstanding. In his famous 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures,
Hamilton affirmed that agriculture was, and would remain, and important pillar
of the U.S. economy. But he foresaw a time when manufacturing would take its
place beside it, and anticipated this eventuality without the dread of
Jefferson and his partisans. Even those who today view Jeffersonianism with
admiration on social and political grounds nevertheless concede that Hamilton
was right on matters like finance and the future of the American economy. Yet
in one more irony, it was Hamilton, not Jefferson, who was swept into
irrelevance after the presidential election of 1800. “What can I do better than
withdraw from the Scene,” he wrote plaintively to an ally in 1802, a year after
he brokered the selection of the hated Jefferson over the even more hated Burr
in the topsy-turvy presidential election of 1800. “Every day proves to me more
and more that this American world was not made for me.” [986] Hamilton’s
notorious – and somewhat mysterious – 1804 death at the hands of Burr in duel
was a fatalistic coda on a dazzling career that ended in disappointment and
tragedy.

With the release of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States is (again) riding a wave of popularity. HarperOne, a religious imprint in the larger HarperCollins (and thus FOX) empire, is riding that wave by reissuing this 1973 chestnut by Elton Trueblood (1900-94), a Quaker theologian who held a series of academic posts that included chaplaincies at Harvard and Stanford. It's a shrewd move, and a welcome one. Lessons in Spiritual Leadership, which consists of a half-dozen essays and a new introduction by Gustav Niehbuhr, covers ground that will be familiar to Lincoln specialists. But that is in large measure because Trueblood's analysis has proven prescient.

Trueblood notes what many observers of the Great Emancipator's inner life have considered a conundrum: "Being neither a church member nor antichurch, Lincoln's behavior was often perplexing to both the orthodox and the heretical. While one group was shocked to find him so pious, the other was surprised to find him unimpressed by ecclesiastical rules and practices." But Trueblood finds no paradox here. He notes that only 23 percent of the U.S. population called themselves church members in 1860; if Americans were religious, they weren't necessarily doctrinal. Indeed, he argues that by the end of his presidency, Lincoln's loose denominational affiliation (he paid dues at a Presbyterian church) actually gave him more credibility among clergy who admired his ecumenicalism.

Nor does Trueblood put much stock in Lincoln's former law partner William Herndon's dismissals of Lincoln's religiosity, because even if an accurate description of his early life (an assertion many subsequent observers have considered dubious, though rumors of infidelity dogged Lincoln in adulthood, most famously in his 1846 congressional campaign against Methodist minister Peter Cartwright), Trueblood believes Lincoln took a decisive turn toward faith in the White House. That faith rested on a foundation of deep familiarity with the Bible, documented here with multiple references to how Lincoln's language cited, evoked, alluded or playfully rewrote scripture.

In the last two decades, a number of important scholars -- Garry Wills, Allen Guelzo, and Ronald White, among others -- have all traced a deeply spiritual vein in Lincoln's political vision, much of it rooted in the hard-shell Calvinist currents in his Baptist childhood. (Trueblood believes Quakers in particular were a particular source of succor and influence.) What's perhaps distinctive to Trueblood's analysis is his assertion that the summer of 1862 was the crucible of Lincoln's religious life, the turning point in his personal development and as a result the turning point in conduct of the war. Lincoln, Trueblood believes, concluded that it was God's will that he be an instrument in a larger design of freedom. What's crucial about this sense of mission, however, is how strikingly self-effacing it was: Lincoln saw his job not to do what was right, but to seek what God thought was right, an epistemological modesty notable for the way it fostered compassion and generosity toward others.

Considered more broadly in the context of Civil War historiography, Trueblood's work anticipated what has become a widespread tendency to see Antietam, not Gettysburg, as the true turning point in the Civil War. Antietam gave Lincoln a political basis to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a political masterstroke that allowed the Union to endure subsequent military setbacks. If there is anywhere Lincoln or anyone since could say it with confidence, here was a moment, the words of Lincoln's famous 1860 speech at Cooper Union, that right made might.

Toward the end of this succinctly titled book, American Studies Andrew Delbanco explains that he tried to avoid traditional typologies in rendering his story: it is not a jeremiad, nor an elegy, nor a call to arms. Nor, he says, does it conform to the most common type of writings about the state of liberal arts colleges today: the funeral dirge. Actually, the rhetorical form that most closely matches what he's 's doing here is History. The book is a meditation on the past, its relationship with the present, and how both may inform what may, for better and worse, yet be.

A truly interesting history of just about anything is going to affirm continuity and change. One of the more striking aspects of this book is the way that many of the things we think of as innovations, even improvements, in the traditional college experience are really quite old. Financial aid, efforts to diversify demographically, growth in the size and range of the curriculum: these trends are at least 150 years old, and recent developments are really more quantitative than qualitative. Conversely, many of the less attractive aspects of college life have not disappeared, and have even intensified: economic inequality, discrimination (Asians have replaced Jews as the new "problem") and vague standards of admissions "quality" that accrue largely to the benefit those who are already privileged.

According to Delbanco, the main difference between what liberal arts colleges used to be and what they now are is a religious one -- or, more accurately, the disappearance of religion, and the attendant moral vision, that once went along with it. As he notes, this is not an altogether bad thing: all kinds of bigotry and exclusion attached to it. But if there was a saving grace in the origins of most elite colleges, it was in their Calvinist-tinged assumption that one's status was a God-given gift, the rendering of which neither fully understandable nor earned by human beings. This precept secularized into the concept of noblesse oblige, evident in places like Harvard's Memorial Hall, where a truly striking proportion of undergraduates fought, died, or were injured in the Civil War, or in the efforts of WASPs like Kingman Brewster to shatter the old-boys network at Yale and usher in an Affirmative Action order. What has replaced it, he says, is meritocracy, which, for all its strengths does little to engender humility or responsibility on the part of its beneficiaries. Delbanco is not alone in making this point; writers from Michael Lind to Nicholas Lemann also noted the less lovely side of meritocracy (British writer Michael Young critiqued it in his strikingly prescient 1958 novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033, which Delbanco analyzes here). But he does so deftly and resonantly.

Today, Delbanco suggests, the nation's elite colleges (which includes universities like Columbia and Chicago, which have strong undergraduate divisions) find themselves more prosperous than ever -- and more anxious than ever. The amenities are almost literally fabulous. But atomized by faculty with limited loyalty to teaching or their institutions, addicted to donations by corporate interests who place primacy on remunerative applications of information, and lacking a vision by which to evaluate questions that neither lend themselves to scientific calculation nor monetary value, our elite schools are adrift. The best way to begin fixing this problem would be to begin with a constituency that is sometimes forgotten as anything other than a source of revenue: students. Assessing where they are, what they need, and what we can expect of them would be important first steps in reaffirming the social compact that was once their source and justification. To which I say: Amen.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.

Stories like those of Franklin and
Hamilton dramatized the power of the American Revolution to transform the lives
of Founding Fathers, but they were hardly the only ones to benefit from the
changes it wrought. The most unvarnished form of possibility took the form of
territorial expansion, as the destruction of the Native American balance of
power with the French and English allowed Americans to push into places like
Ohio, Alabama and Florida. Washington described the United States as an “empire
for liberty,” but indigenous leaders from Pontiac to Osceola, who led military
resistance to such expansion, would no doubt agree that the nation was really
about liberty for empire. Nor were Native peoples consulted in the complex
string of real estate transactions that resulted in the Louisiana Purchase.
White Americans had vast new territories into which they could bring their
families – and in some cases, their slaves – for a quest in which geographic
lateral mobility became demographic upward mobility.

The Revolution’s aftermath loosened
political strictures as well, particularly in new states that in turn diluted
the power of Federalist elite, which controlled the U.S. government in the
first decade of the nation’s existence. By the 1830s, the elective franchise,
still largely limited to white men, was nevertheless the most expansive in the
world, laying the foundations for mass politics and modern political parties.

And then there was the transformation of
the economy. The opening of Samuel Slater’s water-powered mill in Pawtucket,
Rhode Island in 1790 marked the opening phase of the Industrial Revolution in
the United States. It’s important not to exaggerate its impact at the time –
the nation remained overwhelmingly agricultural, and it would be decades before
railroads, factories, and banks became facts of everyday life for ordinary
Americans – but the outlines for new vistas of opportunity (as well as new forms
of economic threats) were taking shape in ways that were increasingly apparent
to the people who experienced them.

As we’ve seen, Thomas Jefferson and
Andrew Jackson became vivid emblems of the self-made man in these
nation-building years. But as we’ve also seen, they were in some important
respects backward-looking, championing versions of the idea that were perceived
as in possible danger, sometimes giving their rhetoric a defensive tone.
Hamilton, by contrast, was forward-looking, at least in terms of his vision of
the American economy; he was comfortable with the idea of nation built on
manufacturing, banking, and urban concentration. The problem with the
Hamiltonian vision is that it lacked the democratic flavor, the egalitarian
tone, necessary for such ideas to thrive in the nation’s emerging political
culture – one in which flavor and tone may actually have mattered more than
content. The man who came closest to successfully addressing this problem in
the first half of the nineteenth century was one of the best known, and least
remembered, politicians in American history. His name was Henry Clay.

Like a lot of politicians of his era,
Clay puffed up his Everyman credentials, and like virtually all of them, his
claim on that status is relatively weak. He was born in 1777 to lower-tier
gentry in Virginia. After his father’s death, Clay’s mother remarried and
relocated the family to neighboring Kentucky – in those days the Virginia
frontier. The path westward had been blazed by the legendary Daniel Boone, the
son of Pennsylvania Quakers who had first explored the territory in the late
1760s amid the military tumult of the era (he fought in the French and Indian
War as well as the American Revolution). By the 1780s Boone had become a
leading figure in the territory, which quickly attracted sufficient population
to be admitted along with Vermont as the first two new states to follow the
original 13 colonies.

For much of his youth, however, Clay had
stayed behind in Virginia.His
stepfather procured a job for him as secretary to Jefferson’s old mentor,
George Wythe, who helped train Clay to become a lawyer. In 1797 he relocated
near the rest of the family in the rapidly growing town of Lexington, Kenucky,
where he settled down, married well, and started a large family. Clay was soon
renowned as one of the most effective attorneys in the state.

That’s not all he was renowned for. As
was common for a man of his station, Clay loved horses, whiskey and cards. His
vitality was matched by his social skills, which proved to be a major asset as
his true passion – politics – came into focus. Clay was elected to the Kentucky
legislature in 1803, and in turn elected by the legislature to finish out the
term of a U.S. senator. In order to take the job, which was for less than a
year, Clay had to sidestep some political complications. The first was his age:
he was only 29 at the time, months short of the Constitutionally mandated
minimum age of thirty. (Nobody seems to have noticed.) A bigger problem was
Clay’s decision to represent former vice-president Aaron Burr, who stood
accused of conspiracy in Kentucky for an alleged plot to foment war with
Mexico. Clay liked Burr and helped him get acquitted of that charge, which was
only one of a much more complex plot involving the creation of a rival republic
between the United States and Mexico. Clay was apparently unaware of the depths
of Burr’s machinations. But at the very least the optics were bad, given that
Clay was a staunch Jeffersonian and Jefferson hated Burr, notwithstanding their
shared hatred for the now-deceased Hamilton. Clay distanced himself from Burr
as soon as he decently could, averting disaster for his political career before
it had barely begun.

Even in this initial short-term role as
a Senator, Clay made a splashy impression. He was a favorite of First Lady
Dolly Madison and a fixture on the Washington social circuit. Clay returned to
Kentucky in 1807, and survived a duel of his own over an opponent’s mockery of
his proposal that members of the state House of Representatives, of which he
was now speaker, only wear suits made of homespun in protest of British naval
and commercial policies. In 1810 Clay was again chosen to fill the unexpired
term of a U.S. Senator. His ascent was effectively completed when, the following
year, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and promptly chosen
as Speaker of the House – a feat unequaled before or since. In 1813-14 he was
one of the key negotiators in forging the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of
1812. He and his colleagues typically finished a night of socializing just as
John Quincy Adams, the son of Founding Father John Adams, was getting up.

Clay came of age politically in a
transitional moment in American history. The Federalists were fading, but no
effective opposition to the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans had taken shape
during the administrations of Jefferson, James Madison, or James Monroe. Some
political tensions were generational, others regional, but they had not
solidified into new parties. One of Clay’s allies in this phase of his career
was his later rival, John Calhoun of South Carolina; the two were among the
leaders of the so-called War Hawks advocating a hard line with Britain.

In many respects, Clay was a mainstream
politician, but not all his views were quite in step with the majority of his
colleagues. Take his stand on slavery. Clay hailed from a slaveholding state,
and owned slaves himself. But he was among the charter members of the American
Colonization Society when it was founded in 1816. The ACS promoted the end of
slavery via the purchase of freedom for slaves and the establishment of an
American colony in West Africa, dubbed Liberia, where they could be
repatriated. Though antislavery, it was hardly an abolitionist organization; Jefferson
was another charter member of the club, which reflected the largely southern
orientation of antislavery activity in the early decades of the century. Nor
did it amount to much. Perhaps for that reason, Clay paid no serious price for
his public position on the issue. But it was not exactly a typical one.

The heart of Clay’s political identity
was his economic program, which attracted passionate followers but which also
sparked opposition. To put it simply, Clay became the public spokesman for the
self-made entrepreneur. Among the most important aspects of his vision was
support of the Bank of the United States, an institution founded by Hamilton in
1791 to serve as the repository of the nation’s financial assets and a source
of liquidity in the economy. Long hated by Old Republicans, its charter expired
in 1811. But Clay was at the forefront of the Madison administration’s effort
to revive it as part of a larger effort to spur national economic development.
He was also prominent in pushing for tariffs on foreign goods, which would make
them more expensive and thus promote American manufacturing as a lower-cost
alternative. Clay was hardly alone in advocating such measures; New England
allies like J.Q. Adams and Daniel Webster were part of this ideological
coalition, as was – for a little while longer – Calhoun, who by the 1830s
became the darling of the South Carolina plantation elite.

It is one of the ironies of antebellum
politics that while the Federalist faction led by Hamilton was dead by the
1820s, Hamilton’s ideas were resurrected within what was still a Jeffersonian
political universe, one in which even figures like the son of his old rival
Adams could operate comfortably as a diplomat in the Jefferson and Monroe
administrations. Perhaps even more ironic is that Clay, who came of age as a
staunch Jeffersonian, nevertheless became as a latter-day Hamiltonian. The
difference – and it was a key one – is that Clay embraced such policies without
the condescension and hostility that had characterized the Federalists. To be
sure, this didn’t win over everyone – Old Republican John Randolph complained
Clay “out-Hamiltons Hamilton.” [Heider 3077] But Clay’s social skills and
penchant for finding common ground gave him an effectiveness that would result
in his nickname “the Great Compromiser” – a moniker that was largely, though
not entirely, admiring.

Of course even allies compete. In 1824, Adams, Clay and
Calhoun all nursed presidential ambitions (Calhoun, who was the least
competitive, deferred his). But all three found themselves facing the
unexpectedly powerful candidacy of Andrew Jackson, who received the most votes
in the election, though not enough to clinch the Electoral College. Adams
prevailed in that tally, apparently because Clay threw his support in exchange
for appointment as Secretary of State (a move bitterly attacked by Jacksonians
as a “corrupt bargain”). In 1828 Jackson trounced Adams, and ushered in a new
era of American politics known as the Second Party System. Jackson’s political
coalition claimed the mantel of Jefferson and became known as the Democrats.

Clay became the leader of the
opposition, known as the Whigs, a name that harkened back to the reformist wing
of a British party that had provided much of the ideological justification for
the American Revolution. Though it was not solely his, Clay became famous for
articulating a program that would be forever associated with him and known as
“the American System.” The core idea involved the national integration of
sectional difference whereby the South would produce raw materials for Northern
industrial production. Meanwhile, high tariffs would product American
manufacturing, and finance the development of a national infrastructure of
roads, canals, and rail, stitching East to West (Clay, befitting his a home
state that still had a whiff of the frontier, was known also as “Great Harry of
the West”).Clay’s confrontation
with Andrew Jackson would culminate in an epic political fight over the Bank of
the United States, which Clay essentially dared Jackson to shut down, and which
Jackson did (thereby damaging the U.S. economy, though not until he had left
office).

What matters most for our purposes is a
speech that Clay, now back in the Senate, delivered in February of 1832 while
running for president. An epic three-day disquisition, “In Defense of the
American System” ranged widely over a series of topics, most of them too arcane
to be remembered. But at one point in his address, Clay uttered a sentence
invoking a phrase that became durably famous. “In Kentucky,” he said, “almost
every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising self-made men,
who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.”

What we have here is a turning point in
American history. It’s not simply Clay’s use of a term – whether or not he
coined it, “self-made man” would be forever associated with him – but also that
he was calling attention to, and promoting, a fundamental realignment of what
success meant in the United States. This becomes plain in the diplomatically
phrased ensuing sentences, which pointed to an emerging divide in the nation
(typified by the drift of his erstwhile ally Calhoun into an opposing camp).
“Comparisons are odious, and, but in defence, would not be made by me,” Clay
said, responding to perceptions of industrialists as representing a new breed
of economic tyrants. “But is there more tendency to an aristocracy in a
manufactory, supporting hundreds of freedmen, or in a cotton plantation, with
its not less numerous slaves, sustaining, perhaps, only two white families –
that of the master and the overseer?”[senate.gov]

In the years to come, such rhetorical questions would be the
bread and butter of Whig politicians. But again, Clay was a somewhat odd
standard-bearer of this new gospel. Whether or not every “manufactory” in
Kentucky was in the hands of self-made men, Clay’s home state was not, nor
would ever really be, an industrial heartland. Clay was the first American
politician to articulate a compelling basis for antislavery in the United
States – one rooted in economics rather than morality – but he remained a
lifelong slaveholder. Such elements in his background helped make him a
uniquely effective in brokering deals like the Compromise of 1820 (a.k.a. the Missouri
Compromise) and the Compromise of 1850, both of which forestalled a Civil War
relatively few Americans at the time regarded as desirable or inevitable. But
Clay’s tendency to split the difference and prevaricate – most vividly on
display in 1844, when he refused to take a clear stand on a Mexican War critics
regarded as a bonanza for slaveholders – undermined the sense of consistency
and trust that he needed to achieve his dream of becoming president, a quest in
he failed to attain in a total of four attempts between 1824 and 1844. By the
time of his death in 1852, the Whig Party had stretched to the point of
collapse over slavery. Dead in the South, it splintered into fragments in the
North, the various strands eventually coalescing in the formation of the
Republican Party in the 1850s.

As we all know, the Republicans would
come to be known as the party of private enterprise. But they began their life
in the body politic by promoting business as a civic activity supported and
sustained by government intervention. Perhaps more important, this emerging
business culture was justified in terms of the way it functioned as an
alternative to a plantation economy that turned inward, away from a government
it always regarded with suspicion, because government seemed like the only
force potentially great enough to take slavery away.

Hamilton and Clay, then, were prophets
of a new day. But the man who more than any other embodied not only the
emergence of a new economic order – the man who in the popular imagination
embodied the essence of the self-made man in the eyes of most Americans – was
Abraham Lincoln. In our day, the self-made man is typically conceived as a
private sector entrepreneur. But even those who see the archetype as a
fundamentally commercial one make room for Lincoln, who resounds through the
ages as the quintessential example of the poor boy made good, in just about
every sense of the term.

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen